I was at a market the other week for some bizarre reason and found a stall selling DVDs for $1. This is always dangerous for me because at $1 I tend to buy almost anything, but I don't think I've ever actually kept any of the discs I've acquired at that price. Despite constantly fobbing off shithouse DVDs to anyone I bump into, I decided that I needed to check out MosquitoMan and plonked down my gold coin.

In the film a plague has broken out in a US city. Scientists try to find a cure using mutated mosquitoes, and a prisoner is set to be the first human trial. Instead he tries to escape, but he gets caught in an explosion that covers him in stuff used to mutate the mosquitoes. He transforms into MosquitoMan, or Mansquito as the film's known in other territories, a man size bloodsucker. A female scientist is also caught in the blast, and she gets worried that she'll soon become the ying to MosquitoMan's yang.

MosquitoMan's biggest flaw is that it should in fact be MosquitoWoman, since male mosquitoes don't drink blood. It's possible MosquitoMan's thirst for blood is something to do with the prisoner's predilections pre-mutation and I missed it. It's said the guy's a killer, and I don't recall anything about him drinking his victims' blood, but maybe a significant detail slipped by me. Aside from that, MosquitoMan is surprisingly good. I mean, the acting is shit and the dialogue's awful, but the production values are otherwise okay and clearly most of the budget was spent on the all-important monster.

That money was well spent, because MosquitoMan doesn't look like his crappy cover rendition at all, he looks more like Jeff Goldblum did at the end of The Fly. Except a mosquito, because this is MosquitoMan not FlyMan. He's a giant, walking mozzie and he's awesome. There are some moments of what looked like dodgy CG, usually these are flight related, but most of the time he's thankfully brought to life via a man in a suit and some puppeteering. The latter is lots of fun when MosquitoMan flails around like a Muppet. There's a bit of gore for those so inclined, but the major draw is the MosquitoMan and monster fans will be glad to hear that he gets a good amount of screen time.

MosquitoMan is a stupid, stupid movie, but it might just be my best $1 DVD ever. It's a shame that the obvious choice for a hero, The Weekly World News' mascot Bat Boy, wasn't called in to take on the MosquitoMan, because that would've made the DVD worth like $3 or $4!

The Disc

MosquitoMan is presented at 1.33:1. It's a TV movie so that ratio should be right, but the image looked a bit squished in to me. The image is mostly clean, with a few spots and specks here and there. The audio is a 2.0 track and I didn't notice any faults with it. The dialogue was all clear and the mix volume was stable. There are no extras, unless one counts the fun of trying to work out what the hell's going on after the credits roll. First the film starts up again, minus the sound. That goes for a few minutes, then the screen goes black for about eight minutes, then grey for another few minutes. When the grey is done the film goes back to its menu, which it skipped on start up, and it's a weird layout. Perhaps all that crap at the end of the film was to prevent anyone from ever reaching the menu screen.

The Verdict

It's a shit disc, but the movie's a fun monster flick, and I guess it makes sense that this DVD is a bit buggy. It was definitely worth the dollar I paid for it, and now I have unrealistic expectations of how great the other five movies I bought along with it will be.

Originally born unto this world as Terror Australis.net back in March 2002, Digital Retribution is a proudly Australian website devoted to all things horror, cult, and exploitation that strives to promote Australian films and filmmakers while sharing its questionable taste in ultra-violent smut-laden local and international offerings with the rest of the world.